International Conference

The Construction of Media-Authorships: History – Present –
Future
June 2 – June 4, 2016

Sampling, hacking, pirating, appropriating – these are only
a few of the manifold creative techniques that are part of contemporary
artistic practices. They are often inherently correlated to the use of
digital and networked media. These practices put in question the
traditional concept of art and literature as being a product created by
identifiable, personal author-geniuses. Nevertheless, individual
authorship is still the dominant concept in contemporary art
production. Despite several obituaries (e.g. by Roland Barthes and
Michel Foucault), the concept of the individual author never really
died: artistic and literary practices self-mystified the author, even
in fields which obviously rely on creative cooperations like film,
theatre and multimedia installations.

Taking this seeming contradiction into
account, the conference turns both to historical as well as to current
artistic practices within various media and fields of communication. It
attempts to grasp them theoretically. Despite the perennial gesture of
announcing and feasting the individual author, since early modern times
– and this is still true today – work processes in art are often
carried out collaboratively. Accordingly, in present times
communicative-artistic work activities and artefacts quite often are
hybrid and diversified into a variety of configurations that manifest
themselves through “ephemeral” procedural performances under the
condition of elapsing time as well as through materialized products.
They are generated under the arrangement of a complex division of labor
(while 'division of labor' is not only conceived and enacted as
interpersonal action, but, in addition, as interaction between human
beings and their tools). Exactly in current times authorship is usually
enacted and performed no longer within the framework of a single
distinct and clearly defined medium, but almost consistently emerges in
multimedia or transmedia contexts – for example, harnessing mash ups or
utilizing social and mobile media.

Given the post-modern medial complexity, Marshall McLuhan's paradigm
of the 'medium is the message' obviously is on its retreat and must
indeed be questioned. For, modes of conceiving and describing
authorship deduced from this paradigm are not able to cover complex
networking and cooperation. Thus, present theoretical approaches like
the actor-network theory, concepts of 'media-ecology'
and the concept of assemblage emphasize the new modes of
interplay between (human and non-human) agents, media and technologies.
Consequently, it must also be discussed how far these concepts are able
to grasp the changes, which current creative techniques undergo.